This invention relates to retail coupon documents.
Previously proposed in Krost U.S. Pat. No. 4,817,990 is a retail coupon document in which two coupons are hidden from the consumer and wherein one of the coupons is destroyed by the consumer in response to opening the coupon document. A manufacturer is able to issue or sponsor such a coupon document in order to target the users of a competitor's product and present them with an incentive for switching to the sponsor's product. That is, each of the hidden coupons would present the consumer with a value (e.g., a discount) for using the sponsor's product. However, one of the coupons would offer a greater value than the other and would be directed to the user of the competitor's product.
Such direction would be accomplished by means of instructions imprinted on the front side of the document. Those instructions would be calculated to ensure that the opening technique employed by users of the competitor's product would result in the lesser value coupon being destroyed and the greater value coupon being revealed. Conversely, the opening technique employed by users of the sponsor's product would result in the greater value coupon being destroyed and the lesser value coupon being revealed. The greater value received by the user of the competitor's product would serve as an incentive to switch products.
The coupon document itself constitutes top and bottom paper panels glued together along their borders. Each panel thus presents a hidden side (which faces the hidden side of the other section) and an exposed side (which constitutes the front or rear side of the coupon document). Two coupons are imprinted on one of the inner sides in an in-line overlapping fashion, whereby the overlapped region constitutes a common area of the two coupons. Instructions for opening the coupon document are imprinted on the exposed side of the top panel. Those document-opening instructions require the user to cut both panels along imprinted lines which are visible on the exposed side of the top panel. The user is instructed to chose between two different ones of the lines, depending upon whether the user is a user of the competitor's product or the sponsor's product. The user will reveal a coupon for the sponsor's product regardless of which lines are cut along. If the cutting is performed along the lines presented to users of the competitor's product, the lesser value coupon is destroyed and the greater value coupon is revealed, whereas if the cutting is performed along the lines presented to the user of the sponsor's product, then the greater value coupon is destroyed and the lesser value coupon is revealed.
One shortcoming of such a coupon document involves the need for the user to use a cutting tool (e.g., scissors) to perform the cutting operation.
Another prior coupon proposal involves imprinting a pair of coupons on the inner side of the top panel. The coupons intersect at a right angle, whereby the intersecting region constitutes a common area shared by both coupons. The top panel is provided with means for tearing along perforated division lines, namely, a pair of zipper pulls which are integral with the top panel. Each zipper pull is defined by two parallel perforation lines. Those zipper pulls form manually actuable tools which effectively cut through the top panel (but not the bottom panel) along the perforated division lines when pulled by the user. Although this variation requires that only one of the panels of the coupon document be cut and eliminates the need for scissors, it exhibits a number of shortcomings. For instance, the revealed coupon is weakened by the presence of the non-selected perforated division lines and could thus become destroyed (invalidated) in response to normal handling by the user. Also, the pairs of perforation lines which define the pull tabs intersect and define a region of particular weakness at their area of intersection. It has proven difficult to design the outer panel such that the tear tabs can be cleanly pulled past that area of intersection without there resulting an improper tearing of the top panel.